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Cryofan writes "Reuters is reporting that the Justice Dept. has
raided the homes of 5 people in several states for trading music on p2p networks. The traders were, however, not arrested. 'P2P does not stand for 'permission to pilfer,' Ashcroft said. The Reuters story says that the 5 'were people operating hubs in a file-sharing network based on Direct Connect software,' and who had provided between 'one and 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs.' 'They are clearly directing and operating an enterprise which countenances illegal activity and makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen,' said Ashcroft."

"This doesn't seem possible - that's what, 100,000 x 300GB hard drives? Are they really providing that much, or is this the total amount available on the entire network?"

Any p2p net out there would be really, really proud to have that kind of hardware to share. Obviously, Ashcroft inflated the hell out of the numbers as per usual and things the people are too friggin' dumb to notice.

As someone who has used the DC client before, most hubs run between 10 and 200 TB or user shares. So the idea that there was 40 PB per hub being shared is preposterous. Neo-Modus had a news item on their site when the TOTAL culmination of ALL THE HUBS sharing data reached ONE PETABYTE.
I'm sure that each hub was probably sharing around 40TB.

They are clearly directing and operating an enterprise which countenances illegal activity and makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen

Yeah, I mean, I gotta admit, I find it difficult to dredge up that much sympathy for people who knowingly and egregiously violate the law... I mean they're not running the underground railroad here, you known? But it's pretty damn dissapointing when your attorney general doesn't know the legal definition of theft.

So you won't mind if I "transfer" funds from your bank account? Great!

Actually, no, not in the slightest - on the condition that it's just like transferring anything else over P2P and it's copied rather than movied to your account - I get to keep my original copy (i.e. my money)

I'd have a problem if you actually took my money away from me - that would be theft, after all.

I'm sorry, were you trying to make a point about "transferring==theft"?

This requires a little explaintion, each of these people themselves didnt have that much data, but they ran hubs that had that much data over all the users.

I have never seen any hub have a petrabyte of data, most of them have 5-500 terabytes.

It also should be said, that most of the data is not unique, many users may have a copy of the same file or similar file. Of course the media spin is to make it look like its more than it really is.

It looks like they only went after the people who ran some of the hubs, not the users thenselves.

In response to one of the other comments, There are many hubs that are not on neomodulas list, in fact the ones on thier list tend to be really small, mostly only a couple hundred users. Other hubs accessible via dc++ have several thousand users.

Yes, but these were just hubs. The actual data was still stored on the computers of the people sharing the files -- and they are ultimately the ones responsible for the data they're sharing. These individuals are essentially doing the same thing Napster did -- provide a conduit by which others can exchange data (legally or illegaly by their own choice) and then not policing it to ensure the content is kept legal (or perhaps even actively encouraging illegal content).

Does anyone else but me think that at MOST this should be a civil issue? Just becuase they've given people the means to violate copyright doesn't mean their as guilty as the people who do it. Last time I checked there was no such thing as "conspiracy to violate copyrights" charge. . .

I wouldn't be so sure. The number of scrolls in The Library is estimated to have been somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000. Now let's make a very generous allocation of 5MB for each scroll. I've got a 700 page PDF on my desktop that's only 2.5 MB, so this is probably a bit high, but I'd rather guess too high than too low.

5MB for each scroll times 700,000 scrolls comes up to about 3.5 terabytes. 5 hubs that each contained 40 petabytes of data is 200 petabytes. 200 petabytes divided by 3.5 terabytes is 58514.

In terms of raw data, they destroyed more than fifty thousand Libraries of Alexandria.

Now admitidly, scrolls are a more efficient medium for conveying information than movies, and the information stored in The Library was far more important than what was probably stored in these hubs. Nevertheless, it makes our current culture seem hippocratic when you compare this sort of thing to the general opinion that the burning of The Library was a tragedy. Many of the manuscripts contained within The Library were aquired by means no more legitimate than today's file sharing; copying without permission.

Really, says who... you? The law? I'd guess your arguement as to why copyright infrindgement is immoral really should be longer than a single sentence to be compelling.

Let's not forget that copyright property is a state-sponsored temporary monopoly which creates a scarcity which does not correspond to any state in reality. No such scarcity exists or would exist except as created by law. If these idea monopolists get to uppity, as I see they have been doing, it is then time to change the law.

I see nothing morally relativist about asking for an arguement, a justification, as to why someone can morally prohibit another person, via the government, from thinking certain ideas or viewing certain materials (copyrighted materials of course).

Moral relativists do not need or ask for justification since they use their own belief system to self justify their behavior, in case you were ignorant about the term in question.

"As a US citizen, you have the right to disagree with laws and lobby for their repeal. You do not have to right to break them."

And if a law is immoral, you happily continue to obey? All law is are promulgated rules passed by the sovereign. If the sovereign, say a dictator or perhaps even a legislature as the case maybe, passed a law requiring that a group of individuals be inslaved, have their property taken away, and or put into camps you'd obey that law?

"You decided that because everyone in Europe drives on the left side of the street, people in this country should also"

Is the problem of driving on the left or on the right side of the road really an immoral law? If you think so it'll be a laugh for you to come up with that line of reasoning.

On the other hand the fact that governments seem to be jailing and bankrupting people in order to protect idea monopolist's profits and in spite of 300 year old copyright law that does not work in the digital age seems to be the type of law people should be objecting to and resisting.

Jaysus, yet another fucking **AA troll. Does it have to be explained, yet again, to you?

Stealing a milkshake and copying a digital file are not, I repeat not, the same thing.

Perhaps a better example would be the person charging you $10 for the recipe of a milkshake and you took a picture of that recipe and shared it with your friends.

Some 12 year old kid downloading music from the internet is not the same as the 12 year old kid creeping merchandise from Tower Records. There is a potential sale lost in the first case, and actual damages to Tower Recs, the distributor, the manager, etc. in the second.

I repeat, fundamentally not the same. How did this ignorant and blithe comment get modded as insightful? More **AA patsies in the mod system, I guess.

One would hope, on/. of all places, that this fundamental difference would be observed. Call it copyright infringement, but do not call it "theft," "piracy," or any other action which it is unequivocally not. There is a difference, and that difference matters. Both may be illegal, but one is a very fundamentally different beast than the other and they should be referred to and dealt with in different ways. Having the penalty for downloading (or uploading, or providing, whatever) digital files shouldn't have the same penalty (actually, much worse) than jacking merch in the store.

The downloader now has in his posession something he obtained without legitimately paying for. That's stealing.

No, it's not. Stealing is taking something away (ie: so they no longer have it) from another party without right or permission.

It has nothing to do with having something in your posession. By your logic people who receive gifts are stealing and people who steal something and then give it away are not stealing.

Word games like this are going to do nothing but make your average joe look at your side of the argument as bizarre extremism.

It's not a word game at all. It's as simple, clear and obvious a distinction as the difference between manslaughter and murder - and most people don't have any trouble with those. The only people who seem to have difficulty seeing the difference are media company executives, their bought politicians and people who have been too brainwashed by advertising campaigns to actually think about it.

OK then, think of it this way: you have a team of 5 heart surgeons and 3 housekeepers. Do you put all 8 of them in the operating theater for your heart surgery, or do you have the 3 housekeeper do something useful (e.g. pick up laundry) rather than standing around in scrubs jostling the anesthesiologist? The DOJ has a lot of people that do a lot of things. If anything, I say we fire the "IP theft goon squad" rather than send them after "terrorists".

the police will do nothing, because I am not a wealthy man. This happened to my brother. His apartment was robbed. The criminal was caught only because the apartment manager inspected the crook's apartment and found some of my brother's music cassettes (his own recordings, he's a musician, so there really wasn't any doubt). The man responisble was arrested and promply released. He was still living next door when my brother moved out of those apartments. There's no room in America's prisons for people who victimize the poor.

My definition of "theft" is something physically taken. This is also yours, if you live in the United States and choose to be bound by our laws. For what I hope is the last time, copyright infringement is _not_ theft.

Actually, widespread copyright infringement IS a crime if the value is about $3000 (this certainly applies) and you can display an intent to profit. In some software piracy cases I've seen, the exchange of software was considered an intent to profit. Essentially, the trade of pirated software was its own profit, and I've experienced exactly that...you used to get one sought after game or program and leverage that to get whatever else you needed.

Which explains, of course, why your post makes no logical sense. You were obviously hurrying through it so that you could move to your next safe house before the Ashcroft thought police bashed in your door to arrest you for sedition.

And as soon as you get your transmitter set up again in another safe location, you'll transmit proof that the World Trade center attack was actually coordinated by George Bush, which is why all Republicans and religious conservatives didn't show up for work that day.

After that, you'll show us how this election is really just another smoke screen because Bush long ago made himself king and will ignore whatever election results there are. It was a deal he brokered with the Supreme court in a back room while the Republican congress ran interference for him by forcing Bill Clinton to have oral sex with their top Republican operative, Monica Lewinsky.

You have no idea how undemocratic the even "democracies" are. Think. Most people you know oppose things like copyright extensions and the DCMA when it's explained to them, right? Yet how is it these things become law? If it's not the will of the people then it shouldn't be the law of the land, right?

The answer is they become law because companies and organisations with far bigger pockets than the average individual exert undue influence on those that actually legislate within our societies. In effect, through things like campaign contributions and lobbying they buy power.

You don't think that Microsoft's political donations and lobbying played a part in it only getting a slap on the wrist from the DOJ's antitrust lawsuits? You don't think that chemical companies not having to pay for the messes that they make because Newt Gingrich killed the Superfund counts? You don't think the handcuffs placed on the FDA's inspectors when investigating food contamination, which effectively make them powerless to protect consumers from unscrupulous manufacturers, counts either?

It's not in the US's interest to have monopolies abusing their positions in key industries. Or to have no effective safeguards to stop companies from polluting the environment without either effective penalty at the time or having to foot the bill to later clean up the mess. Or to allow contaminated food to reach the plates of average Americans.

Yet these things happen, and they happen even more frequently nowadays because the people who call the shots are effectively in bed with those doing the damage.

The foxes are guarding the coop. That's great if you're a fox, not so great if you're a chicken.

News flash: you don't have to be convicted of a crime to have evidence seized. If someone steals your wallet and the cops catch the guy, guess what -- you don't get your wallet back! IT'S EVIDENCE. Once the court case is over and the appeals process has run its course, THEN you get your wallet back. DUH.

Actually under current law, upheld by the SCOTUS, the FBI and local law breakers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H enforcement can sieze property and declare it guilty of a conspiracy to commit a crime. Now you can always sue the government to get back the stuff they robbed you of, but it will cost you at least $20,000 to try. Only the most stubborn go through that hell. Sane people just say "to hell with the American fascist state" and continue their lives as if it were an act of nature that injured them.

The stories of those that fight back are heart breaking, professional photographers that have 20 years of negatives maliciously scratched beyond all recognition by the time they are returned. Men who have their hard won businesses destroyed and their unfortunate employees. Charities that lose all the funds intended for good work. They usually win their court cases eventually, but it is always a pyrrhic victory, years of their life are gone. The cost of fighting against an evil force with the almost unlimited purse of the American tax payer far outweighs the initial losses.

Could you give us some citations? While you're heart-wrenching stories do bring a tear to the eye, they sound -- for the most part -- like bleeding-heart bullshit, designed to make us think that our government is an evil force (rolls eyes.)

Unfortunately the DOJ doesn't have the option of picking and choosing which laws to enforce--and especially not according to YOUR whims.

Yeah! So there!

That's why when an individual or small company calls the FBI, the FBI always requires damages of at least $5000 before they'll even consider investigating.

Yeah, that's why prosecutors have no discretion about what charges they dismiss and which they prosecute -- and they never decide to "make an example" of a defendant, or give a sweet plea bargain to a connected defendent, or dig up all sorts of unrelated charges in order to get any conviction after their original charges fall through.

Yeah! So there!

So you're saying that when Ashcroft came on board as Attorney General, it wasn't his choice to de-emphasize anti-terrorism enforcement so as to concentrate on cracking down on porn and Tommy Chong? Huh, because he touted those decisions at the time as reasons his Fundamentalist base should be happy about the Bush administration.

Yeah! So there!

Hey, tell me, on Big Rock Candy Mountain where you live, how many licorice dollars did your condo cost, 'cause if Bush wins in November, I gotta move there, ok?

Copyright violation becomes a criminal matter once the value crosses a fairly low threshold. This has been the case for several years now. Here's the section of US copyright law [copyright.gov] that covers criminal offenses.

Sharing can be a criminal act.
Under the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act, sharing copyrighted works with the expectation of getting works in return counts as "financial gain". The act makes it a felony to trade works with a retail value over $2,500 in a 6 month period. It sounds like they were well over that amount.

The NET Act was passed in 1997 to criminalize warez trading. I do not think that the act distinguishes between software and other copyrighted materials like movies and music.
Sixty people have be convicted under the NET Act, with 20 sentenced to jail.

Direct Connect, for the three or four of you that don't already know, doesn't work like Napster or KaZaA. The hubs are sometimes public, but in these cases admission to the hub required you to share your own collection for free as well. So the hub owners are not only sharing music with a select membership, they require their members to share large amounts of music as well.

They were copying, trading, and encouraging others to do the same in large quantities. I don't like seeing people's hard drives raided for any reason, but it's pretty clear these five folks didn't have a leg to stand on.

It's also worth noting that to catch these 5 in the act, the government would also have had to partake in illegal sharing, at least for a little while.

This is an established, legal method of law enforcement in the U.S., and is hardly noteworthy.

To catch drug dealers, the government buys drugs from them, while videotaping the transaction. This doesn't mean the government partakes in illegal drug dealing. It's a perfectly legal means of law enforcement.

The RIAA obviously took it seriously when pople said that they would go underground after they started to sue the Kazaa crowd. This is a show of force when they can bring in the feds to help in their cause. Now that the feds are in on the big ones, how long until they start to move on the little guys?

Times like these are when running a diskless [jct.ac.il] server really pays off. Sure, you're limited in the amount of storage that can be made available over p2p, but when they seize your server, there's no evidence whatsoever.

Just imagine the news story for that one: "Teenage File Trader's Computer Seized by FBI, Exercise in Futility"

Starting way back when the record companies were giving grief to the original Napster, many Slashdotters and like-minded folks were questioning the record company's authority to involve themselves in such matters, and said that if Napster was breaking the law, then the feds should get involved.

And then they did.

When harrassment of the P2P companies by both the government and private enterprises became more commonplace, many Slashdotters and like-minded folks said that the P2P companies weren't responsible for the actions of their users, and that the record companies should go after the users themselves.

And then they did.

When the record companies started suing the "whales" of the P2P world (those who were sharing sufficient amount of content to nudge into the territory of criminal, rather than civil law), many Slashdotters and like-minded folks claimed that if it really was criminal territory, then the record companies should stop picking on the pirates, and let the government handle it.

I bet he thinks he's so clever. However I find this story a little strange, the article claims that the five hubs each contained 40 petabytes (7200 Libraries of Congress) which at my count is about 160,000 250GB hard drives. That's ~$26m worth of hard drives per hub. The article is written in such a way to suggest these five hubs were run by people in their basements while the supposed retail value of their setups is anything but basementable.

I guess this shouldn't be surprising though. It is a well known fact al-Qaeda is trying to topple the American government by supporting music piracy over the internet. The RIAA member companies are practically bankrupt from their tremendous losses due to piracy. They're such excellent role models for young people, persevering in the face of such insurmountable odds. The movie industry is soon to be entirely out of business from online trading of hits like Gigli. I feel really bad for those gaffers that only make $250,000 a year that can barely make ends meet because someone downloaded a movie.

This is an extremely disturbing development, seeing as these folks are not guilty of a crime, merely a civil offense. An egregious and large-scale civil offense, to be sure, but a civil offense nonetheless. Which is why there were no arrests. So why is the Justice Department involved?

"This is an extremely disturbing development, seeing as these folks are not guilty of a crime, merely a civil offense."

I'm not sure where you got the idea that this is a civil case. If you'd like to learn more about criminal violations of copyright law, here's the relevant section [copyright.gov].

This war will be fought with new ideas, not ignorance. Being the squillionth Slashdotter to parrot the old "civil, not criminal" meme will not help things. If you truly believe that artists have too many rights and it's high time to put them in their place, the first thing to do is to understand how the law works, so you can work to change it.

Okay, so we're cracking down on copyright infringers. Jokes about "petabytes" aside, there was doubtless a lot of infringing going on.

But this whole thing is starting to look more and more like the enforcement of prohibition back in the roaring twenties, or like the religious persecution that started the American colonies. When something is illegal even though most people don't consider it "wrong," bad things happen. Small-time infringers are getting sued, big-time infringers getting raided, and a fair number of innocent folk get caught in the middle. Some of the Warez folk are looking more and more like the gangs of Chicago back in the day... and like those gangs, there are as many or more doing it for the thrill and the challenge than for the money.

So when do we get a constitutional amendment? When do we get a "digital revolution?" Where are the folk who realize that there is something seriously wrong with the way we understand the words "intellectual property?" When millions of people engage in an activity that bucks the status quo yet somehow remains illegal enough to warrant armed attention from the DoJ, you no longer have a government A)of the people, B)for the people, or C)by the people of the U.S.A.

Once upon a time, conditions like these would start mass emigrations. When the world was still largely unexplored, people packed up, moved out, and started their own countries.

I'm not sure what to think about these raids. For those of you who don't know what direct connect is, it's not like KaZaA.

The client connects to a server (there are many), and then can share files and chat with people on that server. The server does not actually have any files; they come from the clients.

In essence, each server acts like a mini-KaZaA, and judging from the recent Grokster rulings, would mean that they aren't liable for anything. So, basically it means this is just more FUD coming from Ashcroft.

Although the operators weren't arrested, they probably won't see their equipment back for a long time. I guess that is the Justice Dept.'s way of dishing out justice when the law doesn't fit whoever is paying them off's will.

What they mean is 5 hubs, each with 40 petabytes of content available, probably shared between a few thousand members. If you're not sure how direct connect works, look here [sourceforge.net] .

There are lots of hubs around the country hosted by people at colleges with fast connections. Those that host them think their hubs are secure since they can limit hub access to only others having on-campus IP addresses.

I really would not be suprised if the five raids targeted people hosting university specific hubs.

I dont' think you understand the way these hubs work. Basically, if you have a certain amount of data, you connect, and your data is added to a large pool of data (everyone's files). This means the owner of the hub doesn't host all the files, it's the users that are connecting to the hub that own the files (and as such, the hardware). It certainly is possible that several thousand users are connecting to the hub, and are sharing their files. This could easily add up to quite large numbers, without needing a million harddrives in one server/cluster.

Ok, so these 5 people each hosted around "40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs" each, and made them readily available internationally via the Internet. Maybe these records companies and movie studios, with their vast resources, could learn a thing or two about delivering content.

Seriously, a bunch of amateurs can make 10.5 million songs available but the **AA's can't ??? Maybe the RIAA should steal the technology and user base and call it even.

makes as a condition of membership the willingness to make available material to be stolen

Material to be "stolen", eh? Nobody's stealing stuff from me if I offer it up online for them to take. Makes as much sense as "Officer, my house was burgled after I swung open the door and yelled 'please burgle my house'". It's only indirect theft from the record companies as well. If I broke into someone's flat and pinched all their CDs, I wouldn't be stealing from the record company, I'd be stealing from whoever I just robbed. I wouldn't be making any money from the action either, so it's not like the record company is watching money that should go to them go somewhere else, all they're watching is money not go anywhere at all, and they don't like that.

Music has to come from somewhere. Currently it's coming out of record companies, who are consistently saying "how the hell do we create an audio track that people can listen to without being able to copy it". This is a pipedream. If you can listen to it and it's on a shiney disc, it MUST go through a DAC at some stage, and that's where your entry point as a copier is. Even with a decent analog system you can make a perfectly fine copy just off the line out.

If you download a copy of something, rest assured that at least someone somewhere must have bought it. Perhaps now the best thing for the record companies to do is auction off one single original copy of an album with bidding starting at six million dollars, wait for a community of fans to get the funds together and buy it, then watch it spread across the net, safe in the knowledge that they got a guaranteed six million dollars from an album before anyone had even heard it.

I am so glad that you are taking time off your busy schedule of raping the public's personal freedoms to further the cause of rapacious corporate greed while 14% of the nation lives under the poverty line.

>Each of the five hubs contained 40 petabytes of data, the equivalent of 60,000 movies or 10.5 million songs, Ashcroft said.

Does Ashcroft really expect me to believe there are 60,000 distinct movies on that network? Netflix only has 25,000 movies. I suspect they counted the number of COPIES of movies in the whole network. Ashcroft loves to mislead people, doesn't he? Why does he feel the need to inflate the numbers if his goal were upholding the law? Who signs his paycheck, anyway?

Huh? [usdoj.gov]
"Today's actions send an important message to those who steal over the Internet. When online thieves illegally distribute copyrighted programs and products, they put the livelihoods of millions of hard-working Americans at risk and damage our economy," said Attorney General John Ashcroft. "The execution of today's warrants disrupted an extensive peer-to-peer network suspected of enabling users to traffic illegally in music, films, software and published works. The Department of Justice is committed to enforcing intellectual property laws, and we will pursue those who steal copyrighted materials even when they try to hide behind the false anonymity of peer-to-peer networks."

"Today's enforcement action is the latest step in our ongoing effort to combat piracy occurring on the Internet," said Christopher A. Wray, Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. "This is the first federal law enforcement action against criminal copyright infringement using peer-to-peer networks and shows that we are committed to combating piracy, regardless of the medium used to commit these illegal acts."

"Today we are sending a clear message that federal law enforcement takes piracy seriously," said U.S. Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein. "It is illegal to trade in copyright-protected materials on the Internet. This is theft, plain and simple. If you are engaged in this behavior, you are on notice that you are not as anonymous as you may think."

Is copyright 'enforcement' a civil matter or not? I don't get the whole 'arbitrary enforcement' thing the DOJ is doing.

What makes you think a Kerry administration would do anything differently? Face facts: at this time, this issue is of importance only to a very small minority of the citizens of this country. It is likely that the DoJ---most of which is made up of lifers, not administration appointeees---will continue to execute civil forfeiture and prosecute file sharers until (a) the courts rein law enforcement in, something that has been very slow to happen with civil forfeiture in other arenas or (b) enough people are affected that it appears on the radar of general public consciousness.

Any vote against Bush/for Kerry on this issue is consequently pointless.

All math for this comment was done using the all-powerful web interface to the god Google using its conversion feature, i.e., "40 petabytes in gigabytes" don't believe me? try it for yourself [google.com]

Every time I see one of these reports I get nervous thinking that they'll come busting my door down on the mistaken idea that because of the bandwidth I'm using that I must be swapping illegal content.

Of course, I have nothing to worry about, but the abuse of power is disgusting and there are much more important things in our country that need attending to.

"Initial reports filed by the state claimed that the defendents were each serving 40 pentabytes of pirated content for illegal download. After being raided, seized computers were shown to only have several hundred gigabytes of storage. The capacity of the computers siezed was more than 1 million times less than that claimed by the state. The state used clearly false information to procure the warrents for the search... how can we trust any of the information gathered by the state when such a fundamental error occured in their investigation..."

This is the same old argument that comes up, typically in piracy raid articles, where someone states "with all the $crime1 and $crime2 going on, I really want this happening!" Its faults are as follows:

1.) Laws are meant to be enforced. They were enforcing the law. If a law will not be enforced, why have the law?

2.) The argument assumes organizations are one-track minds that only operate on one task at a time. This is like saying "with all the desktop work that needs to be done, do we really need Linux kernel hackers writing more drivers for arcane hardware?" The illogic in the statement is obvious. Simply because a piracy raid took place does not mean 100% of all money and 100% of all resources were utilized in the execution of this one, single raid. The argument is a convenient dismission meant to distract the issue from the event that took place to some imagined flaw in the process of the organization--thereby shifting the label of wrongdoer from the guilty pirates to the guilty law enforcers.

Note that this flawed argument is also often used against Microsoft. "With all the security flaws out there, it's good to know they were working hard on a new version of Encarta!" The statement ignores that Microsoft is a multi-tiered organization made of several dozens of software groups.

3.) It's a distraction from the fact that what the people were doing was illegal and inethical. The law caught up with them.

Copyright infringement isn't the business of the state. Copyright infringement is a civil offence; it is up to the wronger party to claim damages and press suit. Taxpayer's money should not be used to fund a corporation's civil suit.

If you're looking for a petabyte, it's 1000 terabytes (or possibly 1024, depending who you ask).

But you're right, that is some real hardware. I can't see any private individuals having that much at this point. At a minimum, that kind of storage is going to be costing in the region of $100,000 dollars.

Last time I priced it SAN storage was about $2,500 a TB so that makes 1PetaByte 1024*$2,500 or about 2.56 MILLION bucks. Not to mention the floorspace and the power bill for the A/C and the drives. Those guys must have been some fatcat file swappers. There are large companies that don't have that much storage!

"Information wants to be free" and "monopolies are bad" would be those general arguments you're looking for, I think, along with "copyright was considered a necessary evil from the beginning* and now isn't even necessary."

[...](2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000[...]

What, exactly, IS the retail value of a single track off of a commercial CD, I wonder? Or the retail value of a DVD Movie separated from the add-on content (which is often mentioned as a reason to buy a commercial DVD over a poorer-quality illegally-copied version), and/or a DVD or recorded-in-a-movie-theater-by-videocamera movie which has substantially lower quality video and sound than the commercial version would?

It sounds like this network, presuming most or all of the files on it WERE illegal copyright infringements rather than public-domain material or material which the sharers actually had permission to copy - probably a fair assumption - well exceeded the $1000 limit in any case. I just have this sneaky suspicion that, as usual, a single track from a CD is being counted as the full retail value of a whole CD (and therefore each individual track from that CD is being counted as a WHOLE CD...) to pump up the purported value "lost" by publishing corporations...("petabytes" of "stolen" copies! Including 1,976 copies of the same Metallica song, 978 copies of the same Britney Spears track, and 178,493 copies of the "Dance, Monkeyboy" Steve Ballmer video....?)

Shouldn't this also imply that someone sneaking a camera into a theater and putting the recording on the 'net has cost studios LESS (~$8.00US or so at current movie theater rates - the "retail value" of viewing the movie at the theater) than copying a a DVD of a decade-old movie ($15-$30US at current rates for the DVD...)?